Flannery O 'Connor's Essay Writing Short Stories'

In Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Writing Short Stories”, she offers a range of advice that she believes to both improve and enrich short fiction. The most key among these are the importance of developing strong characters, a story’s inability to reduced, and the priority the dramatic action takes over the author’s personal thoughts and emotions. It is these traits that truly define a great story, and although many of the stories from our class good examples of O’Connor’s advice put into action, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is certainly the strongest and most prominent. Hemingway’s distinct, succinct style leaves no room for extraneous and unimportant details within his stories, while also encompassing a rich, unbiased dramatic action
As Flannery O’Connor writes, “A story that is any good can’t be reduced, it can only be expanded. A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you.” Just as O’Connor suggests, Hemingway has stripped the story down to only the barest elements possible while still maintaining the full dramatic action. In reducing the story like this (often by cutting away straightforward details on a character’s tone and attitude), Hemingway allows his readers to interpret the story’s meaning for themselves. This does not mean that the meaning in lost because of these reductions, however. “Hills Like White Elephants” is packed with meaning because of its length, not despite of it. The story is akin to, of all things, a Ramen Noodle flavor packet, as the packet does a great job in providing a rich base flavor to the noodles, but it is also able to complement a range of added flavorings. Likewise, Hemingway’s writing does a stellar job in telling the story itself while also allowing the reader to build on top of his work to discover a greater meaning behind the dramatic action. O’Connor highlights the importance of deep meaning within short fiction, saying that “a good short story should not have less meaning than a novel, nor should its action be less complete.” In “Hills Like White Elephants”, Hemingway is able to craft a complete, sophisticated dramatic
The author must put aside his or her own thoughts in order to craft a convincing and realistic dramatic action. “Dialogue frequently proceeds without the assistance of any characters that you can actually see, and uncontained thought leaks out of every corner of the story. The reason is usually that the student is wholly interested in his thoughts and his emotions and not in his dramatic action, and that he is the lazy or highfalutin to descend to the concrete where fiction operates.” It is of utmost importance that a writer be able to abandon his or her personal thoughts and values in writing their short story so that the story not only has a foundation in real and concrete details, but also in honest dialogue that suits the characters within the story, not the author’s own emotions. In “Hills Like White Elephants”, the primary dialogue revolves around whether or not the girl should get an abortion. Instead of projecting his own values and biasing the story one way or the other on the topic of abortion, Hemingway writes an exchange between two people with opposing thoughts on the matter in a compelling and grounded way. The American clearly wants to have the girl get an abortion, although the girl is unsure about the decision; these emotions are never stated directly by Hemingway, and he instead uses dialogue and subtle changes in perceived